A wave of enabling technologies recently came into existence that will allow restaurants to be run in radically more profitable and customer focused way. Cloud Dine was created to bring the potential of these technologies into reality.

Longer version:

Recent innovations in technology have created sweeping changes in the possibilities for how restaurants operate. The list of changes coming together is amazing. Just to name a few: commodity hardware in the form of consumer off the shelf tablets, ubiquitous wi-fi wireless networks, cloud technologies, internet enabled smartphones, inexpensive internet connectivity, remote management technologies. These changes and others combine to create the foundation for a revolution.

Cloud Dine Systems was founded to utilize these enabling technologies and revolutionize the restaurant business.

So why should you care as a restaurateur? Because these coming changes will increase your profitability and efficiency. The last significant technology adopted by restaurants was the change from paper based systems to computer based point of sale systems. This increased the net profitability of restaurants by 1 to 3 percent. The upcoming revolution will have a similar impact and then some.

I believe these changes will reduce the horrible restaurant failure rate (by some counts 70% fail within ten years), reduce the need for 80-100 hour weeks with the associated burnout, and give restaurant owners and staff some of their life back. The potential to make a positive impact on millions of lives is a lot of the reason why this is worth doing and why I’m doing it.

Naming your company is tough. Here’s what we did. Hopefully it will help someone naming their start-up company.

What to use for inspiration? Take a look at the customer’s daily environment. Look at the items they use. Listen to the expressions they say. If you don’t have access to their daily environment, then watch tv shows about them and read books, industry magazines, and blogs about them. To add more names to the mix, create noun plus verb names from the items and terms found earlier.

We came up with 257 names. And that’s just the ones that passed the “worth remembering” test and I wrote down. Culled down to 29. Then 7. Finally, one victorious – Cloud Dine Systems

Why did we pick Cloud Dine Systems? It just worked for us on multiple levels. The play on an idiom used to express extreme happiness tied into one of our fundamental values: creating customer delight. From a less inspirational, more factual point of view, we use cloud technologies to create our solutions and serve the businesses that create dining experiences.

Hopefully this will help someone looking to name their own company. If you have any other suggestions for inspiration or techniques that worked for naming, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.